The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam

by Sir Richard Francis Burton

Secondly, the delivery of the inspiration by the Archangel Gabriel, and the frequent visions of heaven and heavenly beings recorded by the Muslim Prophet. Without having recourse to any other explanation, are not instances of the kind perpetually recorded in the history of mankind? And granting that such apparitions are purely subjective, shall we charge with fraud all those subject to them? How often has the Founder of Christianity appeared to the highly imaginative races of Southern Europe? How frequently have fervent Muslims been favoured with “a call” by Muhammad and Ali? Physicians and men of science have accounted for these seemingly marvellous apparitions by natural causes. Why then, unless by the action of mere prejudice, should we determine the same thing to be imposture in one man and yet regard it with reverence in another? Who also has even ventured to decide what the modus inspirandi or the divine afflatus really is? The most ancient theory apparently is that angels ([Greek: αγγελοι: angeloi]) were used as messengers between God and man; and thus the Muslims, whose tenets are identical in this point with the Jews, rank angelic below human nature.

Thirdly, the change from peaceful to warlike language, from the arts of eloquence and persuasion to the propagandism of fire and steel. But did not the Founder of Christianity declare, “I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matt, x. 34)? And did Moses disdain to place carnal weapons in the hands of his people? The great Lawgiver of Israel sanctioned the murder in cold blood of women and childish captives. Even kings were hewed in pieces before the Lord. These atrocities were strictly forbidden by Muhammad. Even forcible proselytism was not allowed. The protégé of El Islam paid a small capitation tax, and was allowed to practise his faith and to worship his God as his law directed. Had, moreover, the Prophet forged the fresh order to propagate his scheme by the sword, surely he was not so shallow an impostor as to leave behind him those peaceful revelations which might so easily have been cast into the fire. No; the man honestly believed, like Moses, that the voice of Allah spoke within him.

The fourth error is that Muhammad, unable to abolish certain superstitious rites and customs of the ancient and Pagan Arabs, incorporated them into his scheme, and thus propitiated many that before avoided him. We have seen that the same might be objected to Moses. But Muhammad may surely have believed in the defilement of Allah’s holy places by Pagans, and have restored them to their pure original purposes. Thus the Kaabah, that Pantheon of the idolater, was given to El Islam as the house built by Abraham and Ishmael. And what antiquary so wise as to declare that the Friend of God did not visit Mecca and there lay the foundations of a mosque and an abode?[219] The gigantic tombs of Adam and Eve at Mecca and Jeddah were in the olden times places of litholatry. Yet might not the numerous Arab Christians, in whose religion Muhammad believed before the old dispensation was abrogated by a new scheme, have had traditions concerning the meeting of our first parents on the Mount of Arafat, and their sepulture in the Holy Land? Mecca was at that time consecrated by no less than five religions. The Guebre had established there the Shrine of Saturn. The Hindu had made it the residence of the third person of his triad. The Pagan Arabs had erected there a gigantic Pantheon. The Jews revered it because, as Ibn Shaybat relates, Moses and Aaron performed pilgrimages there; when the famous Tobba Judaized, he invested the house with a splendid curtain. And, finally, the Christians, according to some authors, had procured admission into the Kaabah for the images of the Virgin and Child. Colonists and expatriated men readily connect the remarkable events and incidents of their religion and history with the strange objects revered in foreign lands. The Muslims in Sindh, as an instance, have occupied in force most of the sacred places of the Hindus; often, too, both Monotheist and Polytheist worship at the same shrine. The original Yoni becomes a Da'asah, or footprint of Hazrat Ali; and the sacred alligator of the Hindus is revered as the creation of a Muslim saint. Thus in Ceylon Buddha’s retreat has become Adam’s Peak. The description of St. Mary and the Holy Infant resting in the shade of the sycamore tree of Heliopolis in the old apocryphal gospels is clearly borrowed from the old Egyptian symbol, Isis with Horus in her lap sitting under the Hiero-sycaminon. In the incorporations of traditions then current amongst the Arab Christians there is no valid reason for charging Muhammad with fraud.

To rank the Saving Faith amongst the religions of the world, it is necessary briefly to relate what its founder did for mankind. A youth of noble origin, but fallen fortunes, as was the Prophet of Nazareth, he was strengthened like the Jewish Lawgiver Moses by travel, solitude, and meditation. Jebel Hira was his Mount Horeb. But though surrounded by learned Jew and Christian, his education was defective; and though, a genuine Arab, he thought strongly and clearly, and he was a perfect master of eloquence, he had none of that knowledge which passes for a preternaturalism amongst a barbarous people. His probity won for him in early manhood the surname of El Amin, or the Trusty, and his noble qualities enabled him to marry the wealthy widow in whose service he had lived a hireling.

After a long course of meditation, fired with anger by the absurd fanaticism of the Jews, the superstitions of the Syrian and Arabian Christians, and the horrid idolatries of his unbelieving countrymen, an enthusiast too—and what great soul has not been an enthusiast?—he determined to reform those abuses which rendered revelation contemptible to the learned and prejudicial to the vulgar. He introduced himself as one inspired to a body of his relations and fellow-clansmen. The step was a failure, except that it won for him a proselyte worth a thousand sabres in the person of Ali, son of Abu Talib. With an uncommon mixture of prudence and energy he pursued his task till he overcame the hate, the ridicule, and the persecution of such men as Abubekr, Umar, and Usman. Expelled by the violence of his enemies, he fled his native city—a wonderful contrast to the fierceness and the impatience of his race. But after a long course of meekness and longsuffering in the work of proselytizing, his spirit, like that of Moses, rose high against violence and oppression, and at last—for he was an Arab—abrogating his peaceful precepts he appealed to the God of Battles in his combat for a righteous cause. Heroes and mighty men like Hamzah Khalid and Amru el Ays flocked to his standard, and his personal valour and high qualities as a guerilla soldier soon led him on to fortune. After several years’ exile, he re-entered as a visitor the walls of his native city, whence he had fled persecuted and proscribed. And he lived long enough to witness the splendid success of his early projects.

Abolishing all belief in a local or personal God, he announced to his Arabs the One Supreme, now in terms as terrible as man could bear, then in words so lofty and majestic that they sank for ever into the heart-core of his followers. He broke to pieces with his own hand the images of the Kaabah, and he witnessed the total extinction of a gigantic idolatry—a work of itself sufficient to immortalize the memory of one reformer. He said of the Deity, “He is not enclosed by the bonds of space or by the limits of time; he hath no form which requireth a former from whom he is free; and whatever concerning him entereth thy mind to that he is the contrary.” He preached Allah, the God unapprehensible, incomprehensible, omnipotent, all-beneficent, spiritual, and eternal.

He revived the earliest scheme of Mosaicism and the pristine simplicity of Christianity by making every man priest and patriarch of his own household. Preceding faiths had attempted to elevate human nature above itself, and had, as might be expected, degraded the object of their endeavours. He inculcated the dignity of man instead of perpetually preaching human degradation, he respected mortal nature, and therefore he made his scheme eminently practical with something of a higher flight. He did away with the incestuous marriage with a father’s widow; he abolished the Wad el Banat, or the murderous inhumation of female children. He corrected the laxity and immorality of the age by making drinking and gambling penal offences, and by forbidding modest women to appear in public unveiled. Finally, to mention no other great and good works, by the enunciation of a modified Fatalism—they greatly err who confound it with an absolute Predestination—he attempted to check that tendency of self-mortification which he could not wholly expel from the affections of his countrymen. He died, not like an enthusiast or an impostor, but as one true to the tenets and practices of his life; and he bequeathed to the world a Law and a Faith than which none has been more firmly or more fervently believed in by mankind, whose wide prevalence—wider indeed than that of any other creed—alone suffices to prove its extrinsic value to the human family. This much did Muhammad for his fellow-creatures.

Can we wonder that the Arabian Prophet, finding himself, despite the accidents of fortune, of time, and place, so much in advance of his age, so solitary a being amongst the fanatic, the superstitious, and the debased, fondly believed himself Allah’s Apostle, and the chosen instrument of man’s regeneration? Considering the ardent temperament of the Arab, his high development of veneration, and his discerning the divine hand in every human work and change, can we marvel that he attributed the fire of his soul and the strong workings of his mind to a something preternatural—an inspiration or a revelation? The celebrated mystic Mansur el Hallaj was stoned by the crowd for using the words, “I am Truth” (i.e. the Lord). But his Sufi confraternity still explain away the apparent irreverence of the saying, and believe him to have been, as was said of Spinoza, a God-intoxicated man.

Muhammad’s mission, then, was one purely of reform. He held that four dispensations had preceded his own, and that his object was to restore their pristine purity. But the Adamical had been obsoletized by the Noachian scheme; and this by the Mosaic, which in its turn becoming defunct, had left all its powers and prerogatives to Christianity; thus also the latter dispensation in the fulness of time had been superseded by the revelations of El Islam, the Saving Faith. All the past was now effete and abrogated. All the future would be mere imposture; for his was the latest of religions, he the Soul of the Prophets. He accused the Jews and Christians of entire corruption, of spiritual death, and preached to them with fervour a new faith, a doctrine of life. He openly charged them with having altered and remodelled their sacred writings.[220] Nor could this charge be denied. It is now, and was then, impossible to discover what Moses wrote or what was written for him by Ezra the scribe and other compilers. The difference of style and language, the frequent changes from the first person to the third, and finally the account of the Lawgiver’s death and burial conclusively prove that the Pentateuch had in its present state more than one author. Probably the original draught was concise and short.